Luke 19:5-10 (ESV)
5 And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for fI must stay at your house today.” 6 So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. 7 And when they saw it, they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” 8 And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods iI give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” 9 And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, since lhe also is a son of Abraham. 10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

Galatians 2:20 (ESV)
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

How does this work? How do we die and still live? What the heck is lost and how do I know I’m lost if I don’t think I’m lost?

Reality is that we’re usually very lost before we realize we’re lost. It’s not like we take one wrong turn and go “oops, I’m so lost right now”. No, we have to make a bunch of wrong turns and then, when we don’t end up where we think we should be anywhere along the trip, we realize we’re lost.

We’re lost. Just look at the world around us – at our lives, at the lives of others. We’re broken, we’re lost even if we’re confident we’re not. We don’t know the way home, but Christ does. He shows us The Way.

The Way. The Way of love. The Way of service. The Way of transformation. The Way of radically turning from a life of self to a life of others. The Way forward, not as Marx, Engels, Trotsky envisioned it, but the way Christ envisioned it.

The change we want will not come from us, for our theory, from our self, but through Christ working through us. That’s where we have to die to self to truly live in faith, to live in Christ.

Forward is through Christ. Forward is The Way.